Ask HN: How Are Much Smarter AI Models Made?

Summary

This Ask HN post asks what happens between generations of AI models and how a system such as Claude Sonnet could lead to Opus. The author wonders whether the newer model is trained from scratch, built on the earlier model, or produced mainly through additional compute and training. The discussion also asks how models such as Astra can show sudden capability gains, and whether the decisive factors are money and hardware or less visible differences in data, architecture, training methods, and research.